Ebay

The book I read to research this post was Ebay.co.uk for Dummies by Marsha Collier et al which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. In this post I'm going to write about dutch auctions, escrow sales & having a shop on ebay. Ebay if you take it's combined income because it has sites for quite a lot of different countries makes more than the GDP for some developed countries. A dutch sale is say if you auction 5 identical items you can incorporate it into one listing & say one item is sold at £10 but the bids on the other items are £12 all the items are sold at the lowest accepted bid of £10.
An escrow sale is often used to get people to buy an expensive & a listing with this kind of sale costs a bit more. Basically when the buyer gets the item they can examine it & if they don't like it they can return it within 2 days & get their money back. The buyer normally foots the bill of returning it though.
A lot of traders often called power users on Ebay have virtual shops. The basic package is good value, a featured shop & anchor shop are more expensive but are more prominent on the Ebay website. Finally if you are a trader it's a good idea to get a paypal account as a lot of buyers will only use paypal. Also consider signing up to squaretrade which gives you a seal you can use & if there is a problem between you and a buyer they will arbitrate although they charge a fee for this.